What Verily’s Reinsurance Platform Means for Healthcare: An Interview With Kenneth White

Narrator: This is the DarshanTalks Podcast. Regulatory guy, irregular podcast with host Darshan Kulkarni. You can find the show on Twitter @darshantalks or the show's website at darshantalks.com. Darshan: Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Darshan Talks. We have one of our favorite guests. We have Kenny White, who has a really interesting, there at the back, one that in the right situation will talk back to you because there's a fun story behind it. We are going to be discussing insurance and reimbursement and Verily, and what all this means. So Kenny, you want to introduce yourself? Ken: Sure. Kenneth White, I go by Kenny. I am the national managed care practice leader for Willis Towers Watson, and the director of the Payor Solutions Center of Excellence at Willis. And I have a long history of being a healthcare lawyer. I practiced law for almost 30 years in healthcare as a trial attorney before taking my job at Willis six years ago. Darshan: Just want to specify because he's mentioned Willis, nothing we're saying represents what Willis' official position is. This is just Kenny's personal opinion. Ken: Or Aon for that matter now that we're in the midst of all of that, so. Darshan: Correct. Ken: Although I understand that my email address will get shorter. Darshan: I live for the days when my email address get shorter with my long name, it was always painful to fill out SAP. Ken: Now. Well, [email protected] is a lot to say, [email protected] is a lot shorter. Darshan: I'm with you. Ken: We'll see how that... Darshan: So Kenny, tell us a little bit about what happened with Verily and what does this mean? And is there any impact on healthcare? Ken: Okay. So as many of the tech companies, some that are very much into insurance, Riccardo, InsureTech companies, the other ones it's Verily would probably be referred to as an InsureTech company because it's born of a tech company. So with, with Haven, when Chase and Amazon and Berkshire all got together and created Haven, everybody was sitting back going like, what is this going to be? Every time Jeff Bezos walks to a microphone, people listen because he's Jeff Bezos. So he came out with this idea and everybody just went like, Oh, this is going to be a big deal. So far, it hasn't been a big deal. They ran through several CEOs. They'd been through several CFOs, some innovation directors, et cetera, what it looks that's going to be as more of a way to seriously impact, the health and benefits being provided primarily by those three entities, which obviously is a lot of employees. So anything that many MP employees are going to do as a thing together, will impact the rest of the industry. Verily on the other hand is a company that is being created to provide, what they call, stop loss. It's not really stop loss, it's provider excess loss and stop loss. Darshan: What is stop loss? And what is provider access? Ken: Okay. So stop loss, traditionally is an insurance product that allows self-funded health plans, to access a re-insurance market to cover outlier claims. So most claims fall within a range, of a dollar to a couple of 1000 dollars, in terms of what the actual payout is, not the actual bill charges. But you have significant cancers or blood disorders, or unfortunately what people we refer to, as bad babies in the legal world, where you had multiple millions of dollar claims. Those are claim outliers. That depending upon the size of your pool, if you have 500 employees in your plan, that's a huge hit. If you have, $150,000 in your pool, it's still significant because you're probably going to have more of them or two or three of those.